Digital Initiatives at LAC

Digital Policies, Guidelines and Tools

Web 2.0 Thought Papers

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4. Managing Business Value in Web 2.0 Environments

By Greg Bak

Part I: Setting the Rules

Web 2.0 environments enable collaboration and can provide new means of information dissemination. These tools complement, rather than replace, established tools such as traditional Intranet and Internet websites, EDRMS and shared drives.

1. What is the correct tool for your task?

Web 2.0 tools lend themselves to particular uses. If users require a central location in which to identify and discuss information resources used by a group, a comment-enabled blog may be appropriate. If it is necessary to regularly update a group of people, an RSS feed might be useful, but if you seek to update people and foster discussion among the group, "friends"-style contact lists managed in a Facebook-type application may be better. These tools have particular strengths and shortcomings. Collaborative writing, for example, can be accomplished through wikis, but it can be difficult to create complex tables on wikis and it can be cumbersome to associate comments with specific points in the text. The strengths and weaknesses of various IM tools are discussed in Appendix B of the TBS Guideline on Information Management: Social Media.

In identifying your tool, you may well determine that it is not necessary to use a Web 2.0 tool. If you are sending quarterly updates to a limited pool of recipients, email may be the easiest and best solution. If serial collaboration on a document is required, perhaps the Track Changes function in MS Word, combined with a shared drive folder for archived versions, is sufficient.

2. What is the right balance of level of collaboration versus formalization of conduct for your task?

Participation is determined by many factors: it may be mandatory, based on job-role or professional obligations, or it may rely upon interest and personal engagement. Regardless, ease of collaboration inevitably is affected by requirements for formality of conduct.

Plotting your Web 2.0 environment on axes of "level of collaboration" (open to highly restricted) and "formalization of conduct" (informal to highly formal) can help to identify an appropriate technology for your task and contribute to the writing of rules for that environment.

The TBS Guideline on Information Management: Social Media provides guidance on the kinds of factors that should be considered when establishing Web 2.0 environments within the Government of Canada.

3. What is the right recordkeeping repository for your task?

For some tasks, use of Web 2.0 tools may create only transitory records that can be destroyed under the Authority for the Destruction of Transitory Records. Messages sent out via RSS or Twitter, perhaps drawing attention to a report or new publication, may have no long-term business value and require no retention after transmission. Other tasks may require permanent records of decision making. For example, if you are using a wiki as a collaborative authoring environment, and if it is necessary to identify the input of individual collaborators, it may be necessary to archive the fully-functional wiki. Alternatively, if it is necessary only to archive the output of the collaboration, it may be simplest to transfer the final version from the wiki to an EDRMS or other recordkeeping repository.

Part II: Managing Business Value in Web 2.0 Environments

The Business Value Guidelines, issued under the Directive on Recordkeeping, offer practical advice in dealing with the proliferation of information resources across platforms, inside and outside of institutional firewalls. The guidelines recommend that institutions identify those resources that have long term business value, and focus resources on managing those. Other information resources also must be managed, but they can be managed in less resource-intensive ways.

The challenge in Web 2.0 environments, as elsewhere, is to identify (i.e. declare) and manage (i.e. classify, apply retention and disposition and preserve) information resources of business value amidst the abundance of information resources more generally. Identifying and managing these high-value information resources can happen within the Web 2.0 environment or external to it.

Identifying information resources of business value

Identifying information resources of business value (IRBVs) often is the responsibility of those who create and use the resources, and it often is done in the context of the creation and use of those resources. Environments that support tagging, such as blogs and wikis, offer one means of identifying IRBVs by applying designated tags. Delicious and other bookmarking applications offer a similar approach for web-based resources, inside or outside of institutional firewalls.

Once IRBVs have been identified it may fall to information management staff, rather than operational staff, to impose retention and disposition on the IRBV as well as any transitory versions of the IRBV or information resources lacking in business value that were accumulated in the process of creating and managing the IRBV.

It may be appropriate in some business processes to develop an information resource within a collaborative environment, such as a wiki, but to remove the final version for management in a traditional recordkeeping repository such as an EDRMS. Depending on the business processes, the nature of the collaboration and the nature of the information resource, it may be appropriate to destroy earlier versions under the Authority for the Destruction of Transitory Records.

Some Web 2.0 environments do not enable institutions to identify and manage IRBVs within the environment itself. In such a situation, users may have to transfer IRBVs out of the environment of creation and use once they have been identified. Twitter, for example, deletes Tweets after about six weeks. Similarly, proprietary platforms such as Slideshare, Youtube and Facebook effectively "own" the data that they host. IRBVs posted on such services should be distribution copies. These environments cannot be institutional repositories.

Managing IRBVs

Information resources are managed through metadata. IRBVs have a heavier metadata burden than information resources without business value. Recordkeeping metadata that identifies IRBVs and integrates them into departmental classification schemes and disposition programs enables the management of these assets, while descriptive metadata enables their efficient discovery. Metadata documenting the authenticity and integrity of the IRBV and its management should be captured and will accumulate over time. Depending on the repository, metadata may be embedded into the IRBV itself, appended to the IRBV as an XML wrapper, or managed separately from the IRBV.

Metadata is expensive to create and maintain. Information resources with little or no business value, destined for early destruction under the Transitory Records Authority, can have a lighter metadata profile.

IRBVs must be managed, regardless of whether they are removed from the Web 2.0 environment or whether the Web 2.0 environment is itself considered the recordkeeping repository. In the latter case, GC institutions will want to familiarize themselves with the repository requirements developed under the Directive on Recordkeeping, and ensure that their Web 2.0 environment meets them.

Conclusion

Web 2.0 tools offer new opportunities for collaboration, networking and information dissemination. Organizations must take a planned approach to the use of Web 2.0 tools, and to the management of information resources created through such environments.

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